Happy Day

Today is my birthday (I'm 35) and for my 22 month old, should be like every other day.

As usual, this morning Turbo and I go to Little Sweetie when she wakes.  She greets us with her sweet, little "Hiiiiii" and huge smile, just like everyday.  As I reach her crib, she says "Happy Day" to me.  This is her "Happy Birthday".  Let me tell you, my heart just melted.   Happy Day indeed!!

Book Storage

Books, I love books. The ones on our shelves are full of amazing ideas, information and stories.  When our family grew, our personal space shrunk. At a time when we had less room for bookshelves, we had all new genres of books we were adding (parenting, child education and ALL the kids books).   We purged our shelves donating many wonderful books and storing the ones which we couldn't part.  I'm reaching another critical mass with books and am not willing to do another major purge - so what to do?

Two things -
#1 ~ We found some additional room for a bookshelf!
#2 ~ This is the brilliant one for me ~ USE BASKETS.  This allows me to categorize the kids books and store them front to back on the shelf - expanding the number of books that will fit ~ by a lot! YEA!

I just had to post because it was brilliant and if I put it here, I won't forget the idea or where it came from.  If you want to see pictures - check out Three Plus Two blog just be prepared, she has A LOT of books.

Summer & Preschool Plans

I'm so excited that Summer is just around the corner - despite the chilly weather we're having! 

This summer is shaping up to be a full one! The exciting part is our Holiday to visit all our East Coast family.  This is the highlight of our summer and we are looking forward to it more than I can say.  The kids know Rick's parents well and are super excited to see them, visit their house and see their cousins. We're expecting another niece or nephew to join the family soon!! So we'll get to meet the baby on this trip too.  After we get back, we'll have a little down time, Vacation Bible School, then a little Camp through our community.   Blink ~ The summer is over and School starts.     They say that the years go by faster once your kids get in school.....Seriously, I can't even imagine, but it will happen this year!

Turbo turns 4 this year and it is very customary in our area to send them to preschool. We picked a great one where Turbo would go 3x per week for 2.5hrs per day.  We enrolled, paid a deposit and on some frustrating days, I found myself counting the days until he'd go!  However, once it came time to turn in all the final paperwork, Rick and I decided it wasn't the best strategy for Turbo or our family.

So we're not sending him to traditional Preschool, but will do it together instead. While it was a difficult decision at first, I'm THRILLED about it now. I'm looking forward to our continued freedom to go and do as we'd like instead of being tied down to the school year when the kids are so little.  With the kids at 4 & 2, we'll be able to spend much time on adventures and exploring. 

So I'm in the process of planning away.  While we won't be heavy on the academics, I want to provide him with material that keeps him a bit challenged and interested. We'll be doing lapbooks, TONS of outings, art projects, and lots of other learning through fun stuff.  

So that's it for now.  No pictures again ~ I know. It's the biggest challenge in why I haven't been blogging.  So many have suggested Windows Live Writer that I will look at it over the summer and see if that makes it easier to blog. I really want to blog weekly once we start school. It was awesome to look back over these past 18 months and relive such fun moments. 

Ok, I found a couple to post! Here are soem from our Dirt Park riding adventures earlier this month. You can be sure we'll be doing this often. The kids had a blast. Turbo was amazing on the big hills. Sweetie just wanted to be on his bike with Daddy pushing her.  Cute!

San Francisco MOMA

Taking a 3 year old to MOMA wasn't high on my to do list. However, we've been doing a group art class with 5 other kids and it was so fun. What better way to supplement our activities then by going to see some of the real things! Plus I'd be going as a group, so that would work.  Then to find out Rick had to be out of town and Little Sweetie would join us.

The idea of bringing a 1.5 year old (who wants to walk everywhere, touch everything and climb constantly) to MOMA, while also trying to interact with my 3 year old (and keep him from touching) was just below getting a tooth pulled without pain meds. HA!  Still I put on a positive outlook and hoped we'd last an hour!  I set my expectations really low and decided to go for it!

The day was a huge success! Turbo really enjoyed the museum. They have a small kids area and on scheduled days have Art related crafts for them.  Today we made Zeotropes.

The kids were able to make Mondrian inspired art on the computer. He was the first artist we studied 7 weeks ago and the kids all still remembered his name and his art!

Little Sweetie played with the blocks, climbed on the chairs and read the books

We went on the Family Tour. It was a tough time for Little Sweetie since she wanted to be walking. There is art and platforms everywhere and just too tempting for little fingers. So Little Sweetie was mostly held.  The Docent was terrific! She just took Turbo up with her and went about the tour.  I was so proud of him that he really listened to the directions and didn't touch the art at all.
The tour was on the museum sculpture. 
Turbo enjoyed creating his own puzzle piece sculpture.

INSPIRATION

Finished Sculpture!

Lots of outdoor sculptures (Although I didn't get many pictures due to a squirmy girl!)

After the tour we walked around a bit more. Turbo was intrigued why chairs, equipment and such were art. We talked about grouping with an artful eye and artistic display of common items and how those can both create art.  

Then we went to the cafe for a snack. Doesn't this Mondrian cake look amazing! Even the kids were impressed!

We were there for OVER THREE (3) HOURS! Can you believe it!  We were on our way to the elevators and Turbo declares he would like to see even more.  Nothing a promise of a Pocky Stick in the car couldn't change.  Here's all of us at the end of our long and wonderful day.

COUSINS!

We were able to connect with a visiting cousin on our way to SF MOMA today.  She had her wonderful beau, Doug, with her (we all liked him very much!)

We played in the Yerba Gardens and chatted while the kids ate lunch. They were their usual selves! Turbo was cautious on the equipment and full speed running around the grassy area. Anne-Michelle was such a good sport playing airplane and any other game Turbo thought up!  He was also showing his 3 year old funny side.

Little Sweetie was fearless as usual - going down the super fast slide with excitement and determination to do it again and again. I went with her each time because it was that fast!  But when she got to the top while I was still chatting with Anne-Michelle, I just planned on catching her at the bottom (it was very, very fast slide).  Doug, bounded to the top of the slide and went down with her - such a hero!

She then lead him to the top of the higher than high slide. On the way up, a precocious 7 year old girl asked Doug "How old is your child?" He says "1", the girl informs him that "You must be at least 5 to be on this equipment"  Trying not to laugh, he continues to the top with Little Sweetie.
Now, I don't normally get nervous at slides, even high ones. However, this was the highest slide I'd ever seen at a playground and while it was a full tube I was still very nervous about Lil' Sweetie going down.  Thankfully she realized herself it was too high and led Doug back down. Guess the 7 year old was on to something (HA!)

It was a wonderful visit with two amazing people. Anne-Michelle captured Turbo's heart as he asked me several times when we'd see them again.

We love you guys!!

Art Class - Georgia O'Keeffe

Art Class Week 3 was Georgia O'Keeffe.  While she is most famous for her flowers, the Mommy teacher this week taught us she really a Nature Painter. She painted all sorts of images from nature and would take something small, like a pebble, and use that one image as the entire focal point for her art - making the pebble fill the canvas and become larger than life.

Black Rock and Blue sky

From the Lake I

The teacher had the kids do two projects - both creating something from nature.

Project 1 - Oil Pastels - Free draw something from nature - Turbo titled his piece "Multi-Colored". He said that nature had many colors and so he drew "Multi-Colored"

Project 2 - Watercolors - Free paint something from nature. I think Turbo was just painting at random for this art, because when asked he said he didn't know.  Being the (bad!) helpful mom, I suggested it look like a Lake (I try to NEVER do this! ugh!). Of course he said "Yes, that's it, it's a black, purple and greenish Lake"

We're also going to do a few other O'Keeffe art projects since I have really grown to like her work - specifically the flower paintings.  

Art Class - Paul Klee

For our Second Weekly Art class, Turbo and I were both very sick, so I was unable to teach my lesson plan BOO! Thankfully the coordinator, Rachel, filled in and both hosted and taught my plan (THANKS!).   Turbo and I still worked in the art activities into our day. It was a nice break from sleeping and watching movies!

I created a laminated page of Klee art for the kids to reference during and after class. We talked about how Paul Klee paints in a simple, child-like way with Bright Colors, Geometric Shapes, Faces, Animals and sometimes funny aspects to his work. Turbo looked at the art and told me what he saw, what he liked and what he found funny.  He liked the faces, especially the cat face. He saw lots of colors and animals.  He thought it was funny the cat face had a bird in it and that the bird picture had one upside-down.  I loved that he really looked at the art and evaluated it.  I also noticed he paid little attention to the art work without faces, animals and such.

Project 1 - Crayon Relief - Color with brightly colored crayons then wash over the drawing with black watercolors.

Project 2 - Stencil Shapes - I printed a page with various shapes, laminated it and cut them out with an exact-o knife.  We had both Positive Image and Negative Image stencils.  This was Turbo's first time with stencils of any kind. Using a scrap paper, I used a square stencil to demonstrate the technique for Turbo.  Then I placed the square on his paper for him to try. That was the extent of my 'help'. After doing the square, he noticed the triangle and immediately thought of houses and decided to make this art! He did the entire project on his own - 3 houses with chimneys and smoke and 1 sun.  I will be framing this for sure!

Project 3 - Texture - Paul Klee painted with various mediums and would often add texture aspects to his work.  We mixed 2 parts basic shaving cream to 1 part white glue and added some paint for color.  Turbo gooped it onto his paper, spread it around, mixed the colors and used forks, sticks and other items to add texture to his art. It dries puffy, so the final piece has some texture also. Very cool!

Art Class - Piet Mondrian

A few weeks ago we started an art class. I'm so grateful to the Mom with the idea and who coordinated schedules to get 6 kids (4 Moms) together once a week.  Our group is 3 & 4 year olds, so we decided to focus on a different artist each week. We start with a circle time (song, discussion of the art/artist, and activity or story), then the kids do 3 projects in the style of that artist. Each Mom will teach twice and we'll do a field trip at the end. 

We've been having a terrific time!  I know little about famous artists, I'm not very 'artsy' and it had been awhile since we'd done art - much less done it regularly.  Our class has really been an inspiration for both of us.  Turbo has been asking to do some kind of art every day since the start of class. It's awesome to hear him create something and say - this is like Paul Klee, Mondrian or O'Keeffe.  I've been learning about various artist and expanding the tools and mediums we use to create art!

Easy, Fun and Inspirational.  Here's a sample of Piet Mondrian's art. 

Project 1: Glue bright colored geometric shapes and black lines onto paper

Project 2:  Chalk on Black Cardstock - the kids put masking tape in various locations on black cardstock. Then colored with Chalk. Removing the tape, left uncolored black space between the colored areas.

Project 3: Paint on White Paper - similar to above, the kids placed masking tape in random locations on Paint Paper. Then painted with various colors. Removing the tape left crisp white lines between the painted areas.
 

Where are we?

HELLO!  You might thing I've forgotten about my little blog, or maybe that I'm just sitting my kids in front of the tv all day and have nothing to blog about (my friends are laughing at that!).  Thankfully neither of these are true.  I haven't been blogging for a bigger reason and one that I'm disappointed to confess. I have no pictures. Sad huh.  Really, what's a blog without some pictures - just a bunch of words that jumble together and aren't nearly as interesting.  So sadly, I haven't been blogging.  Don't even get me started on the guilt that my dear daughter has a paultry amount of pictures of herself compared to my son.

Today is no different, I still have no pictures. I'm here because I missed loging our fun and we've had such a terrific time through the holidays and so far this year.  It would be boring to detail it all in a single post, so I'll just summarize. (forgive me my friends and famiy if I forgot something major! Just remind me please!)


October ~ We continued to learn about trees and spent a HUGE amount of time at our local pumpkin patches.  Our city has THREE terrific patches that have many things to do.  If you recall, Turbo was completely dis-interested in our Tree Nature walk and I wondered if we'd continue with trees. We did and it turns out that he still, to this day, will tell me that Trees need water, nutrients and sunlight to grow.  Sometimes that boy leaves me scratching my head.


November ~ We learned about Thankfulness, pilgrams and turkeys. The highlight for Turbo was making this paperbag turkey with Little Sweetie and our friends. It was really cute and he still talks about it.  It was Lil' Sweetie's first glue project. We'll wait awhile for the next one.  We spent Thanksgiving with our dear friends as we've done for 10 years! Only missing ones when we were visiting back East.

December ~  We learned about the meaning of Christmas and did tons of Christmas'y' crafts. We read lots of books and spent lots of time with friends. Christmas Day was spectacular! The joy, amazement and wonder in my children's eyes were my greatest gift.  We also went down to SoCal to visit with family the week after Christmas. It was wonderful to see the kids with their Uncles, Great-grandparents and Grandma.  We ended the year celebrating at our friend's house for a party and sleep over. The kids stayed up until 11:00pm when they started asking to go to bed!

January ~ We're learning about Insects and also the Character Trait of being Orderly. We're having fun with this theme and will soon drive down to Pacific Grove to see the Monarchs migrating. Oh what a lovely site that will be!  We just spent another week in SoCal visiting my Mom and Grandparents again. We went to the Living Desert Zoo, The Largest Dinosaur exhibit and lots of time visiting.  My Grandparents live in Indiana, so it was an opportunity to spend more time with them before they went home. We also spent two days visiting a long-time friend and her family who are all so dear to my heart.  

I'm leaving out and forgetting tons, but that's the gist of it.   My camera will be found and charged over the weekend so I start taking pictures again!  Hopefully you'll see some color on my blog soon!

Merry Christmas!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!  I can't believe it's finally here. It's been greatly anticipated in our house - mostly by Rick and me.  Of course Turbo has been super excited about Jesus' birthday, Santa, all the lights, activities, parties and yummy food that's been surrounding us these past 3 weeks!  He really 'gets' it more than ever - although he won't fully understand until the morning!  We can't wait to see his face, feel his excitement and hear all the funny things he's bound to say.   Our Little Sweetie isn't sure what's going on, but she's been having fun along with us. She enjoys the lights and especially loves to whack at the tree ornaments.  (It reminds me of what our cats used to do!).  Should be fun to see how much she enjoys ripping the wrapping paper open on her gifts! 

I hope you have a safe, warm and happy Christmas!

Trees ~ Week 1

I'm thrilled our first two weeks learning about Apples were successful. We did most of my planned activities and had a great time. Now we're on to our Tree Theme!  I found several great ideas from The Adventures of Bear and her tree unit as well as PreKinders Forest unit.

Here are some of our learning objectives.  Given Turbo's lack of  interest, we might not get in depth on these.

• There are different kinds of trees
• Trees grow things
• Trees have roots, trunk, bark, branches and leaves
• Trees are plants
• Trees need water, nutrients and sunlight to grow
• Trees provide food, shelter, wood, paper and oxygen
• Trees have different types of leaves
• Leaves make the food for trees

Field Trip
We kicked off this week with a field trip to our local preserve for a nature walk. Turbo was to take pictures of nature, parts of the tree and anything else that interested him. I thought this would really get him excited about our nature walk.  Nope. He wasn't interested in the nature, the activities or the topic. He just wanted to ride in the stroller next to Little Sweetie.  Our only highlight was throwing sticks off the bridge into the rushing stream.  Let's just say that I've scratched the Redwoods field trip off the schedule for next week!  Still, I forced him to have fun and take some pictures, he happily took some pictures of tree parts.

We watched this great slideshow about trees. It covered all of the learning objectives and Turbo payed careful attention and asked for it most days.  I wish I could find something like this for all our units as it was cute, concise and accurate. 

After collecting leaves (mostly by me) from our neighborhood to supplement our sad, tiny collection from the aforementioned nature walk, we did some leaf activities.  We haven't been doing many arts/crafts, so this was makeup day!

Inspecting and Comparing - we taped leaves to paper and used a magnifing glass to look at their veins and compare the differences.

Leaf Rubbings - with both crayons and chalk

Tree Bark Rubbings - Turbo had the idea "Let's do this on a tree!" so we set off to rub on all trees in our yard.

Paper Plate Wreath

Leaf Collage - Turbo surprised me with this present he made while I was getting the paint for his leaf painting. Awwww. Seriously sweet little boy.

Painting with leaves - it was so funny, he really wasn't sure how to paint with these. Although he enjoyed it! Not really a tree learning activity, but a fun way to paint!

Then we played "Does it grow on/live in a tree?" game. I had him yell Yes or No as loud as he could if it grew on a tree or if it lived in a tree.  We didn't have enough dry leaves to crunch one for each answer, so we yelled instead.

We read Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall. We also read this last year and likely will every year! Such a lovely book.  At the end we got out the silk leaves and pretended to be the wind and trees.

Kumon Books ~ We continue to work our way through the Kumon books. We're starting off very easy and once I start RRSP, then we'll move onto the Capital Letters book.

Weekly Game - This week we're doing puzzles.  He does fairly well, but they don't hold his interest long. After putting it together once, he doesn't want to repeat the same one again.

Pretend Play ~ He asked me to play grocery store this week. He wanted to play with a 'credit card' and really needed the phone since the clerks have them too.

That's it for this week. I'm not sure what we're going to do next week. He's not that into trees.  Maybe I can find some fun science experiments.  If you have any, let me know!

I'm linking up to Preschool Corner over at Homeschool Creations

Tot School ~ Little Sweetie ~ 13 months

Tot School

Little Sweetie is 13 months

While we do a lot, again, I don't have many pictures. I need to get my little camera and sit it next to me while I work with Little Sweetie.  I've been using Rick's SLR camera and while it's wonderful, it's big and a complete baby magnet! 

Here are the hightlighted things I had out for her this week

- Ball and basket ~ HUGE Hit. She really loves ball and is getting good at throwing!

- Laugh and Learn Piggy Bank - This is still one of her favorite toys. She can do all of it herself and plays with it often.

- Bowl, spoon and cup - She's getting good at feeding herself at meal time and enjoyed the pretend practice.

- Blue Bristle Blocks - Wasn't interested in playing with the few in the basket. She likes the big tub.

- Stacking Cups - She loves to play these with Turbo and by herself. She understands the nesting and tries to stack them.

- Baby Touch & feel books - this girl loves her books and will happily sit there while I read book after book.

We played ball a lot this week. Rolling, dunking, and a little bit of keep-a-way by Turbo.

Hanging out with Brother working on food matching. This climbing business is new to me as she is really very daring!

Family Calendar Time.  Little Sweetie really has the cruising down and goes after what she wants!



She is so excited when Turbo builds something for her to knock down.



This girl is into her ACCESSORIES!  She especially loves to use Turbo's (clean) underware as a bracelet.



Or a Hat.



Big smiles for her brother

Going after the chalk

Working together

Working on a drawing

Other Posts This week
~ See what Turbo did doing during Preschool Time
~ Check out our Calendar Time for this year

Head over to 1+1+1=1 to see what others are doing with their Tots!